In around a week's time, the Japanese games industry will get together for the Tokyo Games Show - an event which is basically the highlight of the year for Japanese games publishers and developers - which includes Nintendo. A few weeks ago, Nintendo announced that they'd be holding a press conference on the 13th of September - a day before TGS starts, which started rumours flying around the internet. One such rumour claimed that the 3DS would be getting a second analogue stick as an add-on, a notion which we thought was so unlikely, we wouldn't even cover it with a story on the site. So you can imagine why we spat cornflakes over our monitor this morning having awoken to see this:
What... is... it?
This, is an add-on for the 3DS, which adds not only a second analogue stick, but also two extra shoulder buttons (L2 and R2 respectively), turning the 3DS from a slimline, portable console into something that resembles a tacky iPod dock. Scanned in from a Japanese gaming magazine, the add-on has been unveiled alongside Monster Hunter 3G, an updated version of Monster Hunter Tri, which will feature local wireless play on the 3DS, and touch screen controls.
Whether or not this is an official Nintendo peripheral - and whether any other games will use it - remains to be seen, but we sincerely hope not. Not only does it look awful, and unwieldy, but a peripheral like this will fragment the market into haves and have-nots. With any luck, this'll be a Capcom created add-on, used only for Monster Hunter 3G. If not, well, the battle to get the 3DS into the hands of millions around the world just got an awful lot harder.
